What's SOPA and why is Wikipedia down?
The Wikipedia community made a bold move in joining the January 18th
protest against SOPA. They "blocked" their English-language site for
the day. This gave users a taste of the void that might occur were the SOPA or PIPA bills to pass, with the subsequent draconian powers executed.
However much one might be frustrated by the loss of factoid-validation for a day, the temporary loss of Wikipedia is a price worth paying to bring the problems with these Bills to a wide attention. One day's symbolic blackout is a worthy investment in the continuing free and open Internet.
To learn more about the educational efforts by Wikipedia concerning SOPA and PIPA, visit Wikipedia's SOPA announcement.
SOPA and PIPA would not achieve what they claim to wish to achieve. Furthermore, there is already plenty of legal recourse for those who believe their copyrights have been breached; indeed, laws like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act are already considered by most technically-savvy observers to be overly draconian. SOPA and PIPA take the kangaroo-court problems of the DMCA and make them astronomically worse. They take the approach of shoot first, ask questions later. And when they shoot, they use cluster weapons.
The US Government and its agents could command search engines, Internet Service Providers and hosting companies arbitrarily to block and change websites - sometimes completely - after little more than a complaint about one posting on one forum of the site. The host would be ordered to keep the block running automatically ad infinitum, at the very fundament of the Internet. As you can imagine, this would raise the costs of Internet services, as the industry would need to implement tools and procedures to comply with these new laws: tools that serve nobody's interests except those of the censors and their agents.
It will also dramatically shift the balance of power on the Internet. Even now, the DMCA has been used to chill free speech. SOPA and PIPA take that to the final extreme, where media oligarchs and worse will be able to flag sites as violators of SOPA and PIPA, and destroy their online presence totally and radically beyond the purview of any judge.
The peculiarly wide-ranging and ambiguous scope of the proposed legislation can be seen in its bizarre title: "To promote prosperity, creativity, entrepreneurship, and innovation by combating the theft of U.S. property, and for other purposes. —H.R. 3261". "Other purposes"? What "other purposes"? This is left to the imagination (quartering soldiers? Who knows?) . And it is astonishing that a Bill should wilfully confuse property with copyright licenses, which remain two distinct legal entities, however successful the propaganda phrase "intellectual property".
We join with and applaud sites, especially those with such broad
audiences as Wikipedia, in bringing awareness to this
proposed legislation, which is so inimical to liberty and free markets.
If you'd like to learn more, and are in New York, Boston, Philadelphia
or Washington DC on January 19-25, please register for one of our free educational events about Cloud Computing and SOPA or a discussion with Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation about SOPA and freedom in "the cloud".